Five Things I Learned Watching the Super Bowl

Everybody else is writing about the Super Bowl, so why not me? Here is my obligatory post-game analysis:

  1. Aaron Rodgers is as cool as a cucumber. The Packers quarterback is the kind of guy I’d want landing my plane in the Hudson River or performing brain surgery on me.
  2. H.L. Mencken was right. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” There were countless examples of this last night, but the absurd Sam Elliot intros and the abridged Declaration of Independence jump right out at me.
  3. I hate halftime shows. During the season, halftime is 12-15 minutes. Super Bowl halftime should be the same length — subjecting the teams to the same conditions they play under during the year. And the Black Eyed Peas are an idea that works better in the studio than on a stage.
  4. Christina Aguilera is an abomination. Nuff said.
  5. There is no Super Bowl of advertising. The quality of TV creative through the year is so consistently good that many of the commercials seemed ordinary. That said, this Carmax spot made me feel like a geek at a robot convention:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH_IqDD58Qg[/youtube]

5 thoughts on “Five Things I Learned Watching the Super Bowl

  1. One of these years, something will go wrong at halftime that causes the second half to be delayed. With all the nonsense around the show (special effects, moving stages, scores or performers) it’s inevitable. Only then will the NFL tone things down.

  2. The Mencken quotation is a paraphrase that has become widely accepted. What he actually said, according to the scholars, is longer, but infinitely more interesting.

    “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain
    people.”

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